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The Queen of Cable TV

Early in Bonnie Hammer’s first stint running a cable network, she knew something was wrong. The SciFi channel was emerging as a destination for fans of the genre, largely on her strategy of reviving the mini-series.

But looking at the first day of shooting “Taken,” an alien abduction series with what then was the outrageous budget of $40 million, she knew the lead child actress was not strong enough. She pushed the show’s studio, Dreamworks, and its renowned producer, Steven Spielberg, for a different actress.

Her choice: the 10-year-old Dakota Fanning.

“Taken” vaulted the fledgling network to the No. 1 spot in cable ratings for two weeks, an early sign of Ms. Hammer’s astute programming instincts and of a quality her mentor, Barry Diller, called “a steely resolve.”

A decade later, Ms. Hammer has ridden that resolve and those instincts to a position of enormous influence and financial power in cable television. If cable is king, Ms. Hammer, chairwoman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, is cable’s queen and, since the departure of Judy McGrath from Viacom last May, possibly its most important executive.

Her ever-expanding collection of assets, including USA Network, the renamed Syfy, the E Entertainment channel, and the G4 network, as well as a nascent but growing television production studio, were the linchpin of Comcast’s $30 billion takeover of NBC Universal in 2009.

Photo

NBCUniversal credits the cable group under Bonnie Hammer with making “the biggest part” of the company's revenue.Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Published reports have estimated the annual profit for those assets at close to $2 billion. Stephen B. Burke, the NBCUniversal chief executive, said the figure was slightly lower, but he acknowledged that Ms. Hammer’s portfolio supplied “the biggest part” of the company’s overall revenue — far bigger than the Universal movie studio and the faltering NBC broadcast network.

USA has been the flagship of Ms. Hammer’s success, having finished as the top-rated channel in cable for 22 consecutive quarters. Under her, Syfy has also become a top-10 cable channel. (Mr. Diller said Ms. Hammer had turned what was a $50 million to $70 million annual profit for Syfy into $500 million a year).

Mr. Diller, now the IAC/InterActiveCorp chairman, said in a telephone interview, “The only person in cable programming who has done a job almost as good as Bonnie has done is Roger Ailes at the Fox Network. They are the only two people who are actually responsible for the success of their ventures.”

Mr. Diller said that when Vivendi sold the assets of Universal to NBC in 2004, the value set for USA and Syfy was $12 billion. “I said at the time, we can’t get any more value out of it,” Mr. Diller said. “I was that wrong.” He said since then he had realized “we underpriced it by $7 billion, for sure.” The difference, Mr. Diller said “is all Bonnie.”

Ms. Hammer now is turning her attention to another cable property, hoping to move the 15th-ranked E, over which she gained control after Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, into the same rarefied ratings territory as USA and Syfy.

“E has the possibility of growing exponentially, and yes I believe it could be a top 10 network,” Ms. Hammer said in an interview in her office at 30 Rockefeller Center. It is a prediction the rest of the cable business should probably take seriously. “She is a very, very determined person,” Mr. Burke said. “She is one of the most competitive business people I have ever met.”

Ms. Hammer, 61, started as a producer for the public television station WGBH in Boston, where, in an edit room, she noticed that the host of a do-it-yourself show seemed far less charismatic than the owner of the house being profiled in the show — and that was the beginning of Bob Vila’s television career.

She hit her stride in the 1980s, initially at Lifetime and then at USA, where she made her first big impression wrangling Vince McMahon and his unruly wrestling franchise, the WWF (now WWE).

“She just came in and rolled up her sleeves,” Mr. McMahon said. “She taught us a lot about network quality writing, story arcs, character development. She really helped the overall brand.”

Ms. Hammer decided that the heavy sports emphasis of the wrestling program limited its audience. “I thought it should be male soap opera,” she said.

Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal represented Ms. Hammer’s sixth management transition. Her retention was never in doubt. The old NBC regime, under General Electric, had long cited USA as NBCUniversal’s most prized asset, and tried to keep her happy — to a point.

Ms. Hammer said that one tempting job did not quite materialize: the assignment of fixing NBC’s disastrous entertainment division. It would probably have meant moving to Los Angeles from New York, and she had a son happy in school in the East.

But at a lunch with the then-chief NBC executive, Jeff Zucker, Ms. Hammer had been prepared to discuss the possibilities, perhaps suggesting she could commute to the job.

Mr. Zucker did not offer it. “There was a bit of fear that USA is making so much money we have to protect it,” Ms. Hammer said.

She left the lunch disappointed. She said: “When I realized it wasn’t going to go in that direction, I said to myself: O.K., they’re not going to give me what I want. I’m going to turn what I have into what I want. It was that crystal clear to me. That I and my team were going to make USA into something that was as strong as a broadcast network.”

The key to success centered on branding, programming, marketing and promotion. The term “blue skies” was central. Ms. Hammer defined that in both literal and figurative terms. Shows would be largely shot outdoors in sunlight — one reason, she said, that USA dramas did especially well in the summer. And their themes would be “aspirational — it makes you feel good rather than you shut it off and you’re in some dark place, depressed.”

The emphasis would always be on quirky, flawed characters with humor. Ms. Hammer said the network applied these standards rigorously. (She monitored wardrobe decisions on every show, tearing out magazine fashion layouts and sending them to producers to illustrate how the characters should dress.)

Last summer, USA had seven of the top 10 scripted hits on cable. Its biggest current shows are “Royal Pains,” “Suits” and “Burn Notice.” She said of the show’s development process, “We can’t guarantee hits, but we’ve eliminated a lot of failure.”

The biggest immediate challenge, Ms. Hammer said, is rebranding the E channel. She said that E was successful financially, but not as much as it could be because some advertisers were reluctant to buy some of E’s “celeb-reality” shows.

Ms. Hammer said she planned to make E more credible and clever. She will also introduce scripted shows. “The idea is to turn it into a brand that’s really the pulse of pop culture,” she said.

Beyond all the cable duties, she supervises Universal Cable Productions. The studio supplies shows to USA and Syfy, but already it has branched out, supplying shows to MTV and Lifetime, and has this year even sold scripts to NBC, ABC and Fox.

The plate of responsibilities sounds full, but Mr. Diller said, “she’s still underemployed.”

As for that network thing, Ms. Hammer said she knew there would have been pitfalls. Still, asked if she had no regrets, she said, “Can’t say that.”

She added, “My hope and my belief in myself is: I could have done it.”

Correction: December 20, 2011

A picture caption on Monday with an article about Bonnie Hammer, the head of NBCUniversal’s cable unit, misstated the name of the USA Network show in which Gabriel Macht and Gina Torres appear. It is “Suits” — not “Dirty Little Secrets,” which is the name of the episode in which the scene shown in the picture took place.

A version of this article appears in print on December 19, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Queen of Cable TV. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe